KunstenaarSwedish
Selma Lagerlöf
2 actieve items
Selma Ottilia Lovisa Lagerlöf was born on 20 November 1858 at Mårbacka, a manor in the Värmland province of Sweden, and died there on 16 March 1940. The house never ceased to shape her: the oral storytelling traditions of the Värmland countryside, the fairy tales told by her grandmother, and the eventual loss of the estate when her father died in debt all fed into a literary imagination that was fundamentally rooted in place, memory, and the tension between the mythic and the documentary.
A hip injury sustained at birth left her partially disabled in childhood, and a period of near-immobility became formative reading time. She trained as a teacher at Högre lärarinneseminariet in Stockholm, graduating in 1885, and spent the next decade teaching girls at a school in Landskrona. During those years she drafted what would become Gösta Berlings saga (1891), her first novel, published when she was 33. The book was a deliberate revolt against the naturalist prose dominant in Scandinavian letters at the time, drawing instead on Romantic sweep, Värmland legend, and a narrative rhythm closer to the spoken word than the realist paragraph. It sold slowly at first and was only gradually recognised as a turning point in Swedish literature.
The work that brought her widest international reach was also, technically, a school textbook. Nils Holgerssons underbara resa genom Sverige (1906-1907) was commissioned by the Swedish school authorities as a geography primer - the conceit of a boy flying over Sweden on the back of a goose allowed Lagerlöf to map the country province by province while weaving in folklore and natural history. The book was translated into more than forty languages within decades and has never gone out of print.
In 1909, Lagerlöf became the first woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, recognised for what the Swedish Academy described as "lofty idealism, vivid imagination, and spiritual perception." In 1914 she became the first woman elected to the Swedish Academy itself. She used her Nobel money to buy back Mårbacka, which had been sold after her father's death, and the estate remained her home and working base until she died. She was also a committed political voice: she gave the opening address at the International Suffrage Congress in Stockholm in 1911 and spoke publicly for women's voting rights through the movement's eventual Swedish victory in 1919. In 1991, she became the first woman depicted on a Swedish banknote, on the 20-kronor note.
At auction, Selma Lagerlöf appears primarily as a subject for book collectors and literary archivists rather than as a visual artist. The database at Auctionist shows 51 lots, concentrated in Collectibles, with appearances at Karlstad Hammarö Auktionsverk, Crafoord Auktioner Lund, Connoisseur Bokauktioner, and Auktionshuset Thörner and Ek among the leading houses. Items include signed first editions - notably a copy of "Höst" with her handwritten dedication (realised 1,200 SEK), a signed copy of "Kejsarn av Portugallien" (1,047 SEK), and a 12-volume collected works in leather binding with gilt edges. Prices are modest by fine-art standards but reflect genuine collector demand for association copies, signed cards, and presentation volumes connected to one of the most translated Swedish writers of any century.